By early next year we will have tapas, pizza, pasta and poppadoms until they are coming out of our ears.

The square might make much of its heritage as part of the city's educational life but you won't find our gastronomic heritage on any menu.

Platillos is home-grown but it serves tapas. Oh for a fish and chip restaurant or some young and trendy local chef delivering Modern British cooking in the centre of the city.

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The second place to open is the faux-Italian Zizzi, the upmarket version of Ask, which already has premises on Barkers Pool.
They've obviously spent a lot of money on it. One side opens on the West Street and the other the square itself, where tables outside overlooking the water feature will doubtless be a draw in summer.

Your first impression is of wood – the wooden furnishings and floors, logs decorating the walls and stacked behind the bright red pizza oven (although these are for show, it's fired by gas) which dominates the restaurant.

We enter from West Street and are picked up effortlessly and professionally (service is a very strong point here) and escorted to a table next to the square entrance.

This is a mezzanine floor, looking down at tables in the 'pit' of the restaurant, flanked by the oven and a bar.

The menu is a slimmed-down version of what you might find in a "traditional" Italian restaurant, with pizza and pasta at its heart, plus a few risottos and a handful of specials.

Our waitress, Kathryn, a smiling, cheerful girl, took our order without any notes. She was going to do it from memory so I was determined to catch her out. I couldn't.

I watched her at work. She's pretty good at her job.

After olives (£2.25), ciabatta and oil (£2.45) and fizzy water £1.85) which Kathryn had effortlessly charmed us into ordering, we started pretty well.

Both were assembly jobs: insalata litorale (£4.65), a very generous portion of crayfish, smoked salmon, rocket and tomatoes with a zesty orange dressing, and grilled goats cheese on ciabatta with caramelised balsamic onions (£4.65).

Both were fine although I couldn't help notice that Portion Control had been hard at work on my goats cheese. There was just a half-inch disc of cheese on top of each roundel of bread.

I stood up to get a grandstand view of the kitchen making pizzas. Yes, they were flipping them professionally, so they appeared to be handmade, before putting them in the oven. But what a disappointment!
For a place which majors on pizzas I have never had such a boring one in my life.

I ordered pizza capriciosa (£8.25), which the menu can't spell, topped by an egg surrounded by roast peppers, capers, olives, ham and anchovies – chiefly because I adore anchovies.

The menu doesn't make it clear that here they use vinegary white anchovies, not those little olive oil-matured fillets of intense salty flavour.

The base was thin and tasteless. We suspected the kitchen does not put salt in the dough. The vinegar flavour of the anchovies penetrated the rest of the topping, overpowering any merit in the tomato sauce.

To top it all the ham had been put on the pizza after it came out of the oven so it was warm and limp rather than hot and crisp. And clever Italians put the egg on last so it comes out runny. This was hard.
My wife's pasta dish, ravioli filled with mushroom and ricotta (£8.75) was a lot better with a good, mushroomy filling but all they had to do was reheat this dish, made in a central kitchen.

They do make a couple of desserts themselves; an apple crumble (the fruit was too sharp) and a banana waffle, which happily reminded my wife of the waffle stall in Scarborough. Both were £4.75.

With a couple of glasses of wine and coffees our bill came to £55.10 and we were less than impressed by Zizzi. For this price we could have gone to a real Italian restaurant and probably had a lot more fun.
But we wouldn't have had the service from Kathryn.

Izzi, Unit 8, Leopold Square, Sheffield. Tel 0114 278 7718.
Open all week, 12-11pm.
Disabled access and toilets.
Credit cards.
Wines from £11.95.
Music (tuneless).
Street parking.
Website: www.zizzi.co.uk
My star ratings (out of five):
Food 2
Atmosphere 3
Service 4
Value 3

Italian restaurant. Do not compare ratings between places of different style or price.

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